China

IN
India, it is still ourselves that we see. If the grandiose pessimism, which
makes her plastic language so intoxicating, opens up to us regions in ourselves
that we had not explored, it dominates us from the first, because the rhythm of
that language relates it, secretly, with all those other languages that express
Occidental optimism. In China, on the contrary, we no longer understand.
Although it includes a third of mankind, this country is the most distant, the
most isolated of all. We are confronted with a method that escapes us almost
absolutely, with a point of departure that is not ours, with a goal that does
not resemble ours, with a movement of life that has neither the same appearance
nor the same direction as ours. To realize unity in the spirit is, doubtless,
what the Chinese tends toward, as we do. But he does not seek that unity along
the roads where we seek it.

China
has not, however, remained as closed as it is said to have been. It mingled
with Aryanism incessantly, to the point of producing mixed civilizations, as in
Indo-China and in Tibet, for example, where it allowed the rivers of love
pouring from the Hindu soul to carry a little of their disquieting ardor into
its serious, positive, easy-going, and rather sullen soul. It knew the worlds
that were the farthest removed from it, and the most ancient. Rome trafficked
with it two thousand years ago; Chaldea, twenty centuries before Rome, taught
it astronomy. Nearer to our time, Islam affected it to the point of bringing
twenty or thirty millions of Chinese to the god of Mohammed. In the sixteenth
century, after the Mongol conquest, Pekin was perhaps the most cosmopolitan and
the most open city in the world. The Portuguese and the Venetians sent their
merchants there, and the imperial court had artists and savants come from
India, from Persia, and even from western Europe.

However,
as far back as we look into the past of China, it seems not to have moved. The
myth period of its life ends about the century of Pericles, perhaps; the apogee
of its vital power oscillates between the fifth and the fifteenth century of
our era, its decline begins at the hour when the Occident is about to put its
stamp on history. But one must look closely to distinguish one or another of
these phases of its activity. The material testimony of its legendary period
that comes down to us does not differ very greatly from what it is producing in
our own day, and if its most vigorous effort coincides with that of the Middle
Ages of the Occident, the fact would seem to demonstrate only the more
clearly—through the insensible passages that attach it to its past and its
present—that it has never come out of its own Middle Ages and that we do not
know when it entered upon them. In reality, it is the inner world of the
Chinese that has never opened for us. It is in vain that we feel their social
civilization as more perfect than our own, it is in vain that we admire the
results among them of a moral effort that was as great as our own. We do not
always understand them better than we do the ants or the bees. There is the
same mystery, awe inspiring and almost sacred. Why are we so made that we can
conceive only of our own mode of association and only our own mechanism of reasoning?
Whether the Chinese is superior to us or inferior is something that it is
impossible for us to say, and the problem, thus presented, is without
significance. The Chinese has followed an evolution that we have not followed;
he constitutes a second branch of the human tree that separated from the first;
we do not know whether their branches will reunite.

The
Indo-European world turns, with all its instinct, toward the future. The
Chinese world, with all its consciousness, turns toward the past. Therein lies
the gulf which, perhaps, cannot be crossed. There is the whole secret of the
power of expansion of the Occident, of the hermitism of China, of the strange
impersonality of its plastic language. Taken in the mass, China shows no change
in time, no movement in space. One would say that it expresses a people of old
men, ossified from infancy. It is never to himself that the Chinese looks for
his law; it is to his father, to his grandfather, and, beyond his father and
grandfather, to the infinite multitude of the dead who govern him from the
depths of the centuries. And in fact, it is not the law that he asks, but the
recipe for adapting himself to the surroundings that nature has made for him,
surroundings, moreover, which change but little.

At
first, one thinks of Egypt, of its geological and agricultural immobility, of
its impersonal, collective art, hermetical and abstract. But Egypt is restless;
it cannot quench the flame that, despite the will of the people, bursts from
the heart of the material in which they worked with such passion. An invincible
idealism crowded them to a horizon which was distasteful for them to behold.
The Chinese also evolved under outside influence, unquestionably, but around
the same fixed point. He remained practical and self-centered, narrowly
realistic, devoid of imagination, and, in reality, without desires. Where the
Egyptian people suffers from the domination of the priest and tries to forget
him by exploring life in its depths, the Chinese accepts without revolt the tyranny—the
benevolent tyranny, we may observe—of the mandarin, because it in no wise
disturbs the doting satisfaction of his tastes. At least, we know nothing of
the immemorial evolutions which must have led him to that state of mind.
Confucius regulated morality once for all; it remained fixed in very accessible
formulas and kept to its traditional rut through the unquestioning, dogmatic
respect, ritualized and blind, that one owes to one's parents, to the parents
of one's parents, to the dead parents of one's ancestors. The upward movement,
which characterizes life for us and prevents us from arresting it in a definite
formula, crystallized, for the Chinese, into a form which is perhaps not always
the same, but through which one gets back to the same principle, a form
determined by this principle to the minutest detail. The Chinese is satisfied
with it, he has no need to seek any other principle. In reality, if he remains
motionless, it is because he has so many native virtues and because his
imagination atrophies through never having to exert itself or to struggle. He
will receive without difficulty the moral teachings of Buddhism and later on of
Islam, because they are practically in agreement with the essential part of
what Confucius brought to him. In the religion of Confucius he will find even
the belief in Nirvana of the one and the fatalism of the other, and they will
cause him to lull into indifference whatever momentary impulses toward revolt
he may have.

As far
back as we go into the distant childhood of China, we find the race already
molded to certain metaphysical abstractions and certain moral entities from
which all later forms of expression will descend. The Aryan goes from the
concrete to the abstract, the Chinese from the abstract to the concrete. With
the Aryan, the general idea is the flower of objective observation, and
abstraction is always a thing in process of evolution. With the Chinese, the
general idea seems to precede the objective study of the world and the progress
of the abstraction ends sharply as soon as a moral law sufficient to sustain
social relationships has appeared to the philosopher. In the Occident the
symbol comes out of life, and frees itself from life, little by little, through
progressive generalizations which are forever broadening, or which start out
anew on other bases. In China the symbol governs life and shuts it in from
every side.

The
ever-changing reality which the Occidental desires, the idealistic conquest
which tempts him, and man's attempt to rise toward harmony, intelligence, and
morality seem to remain unsuspected by the Chinese. He has found, at least he
thinks he has found, his mode of social relationships. Why should he change?
When we denounce his absence of idealism, perhaps we are only saying that his old
ideal realized its promises long ago and that he enjoys the unique privilege of
maintaining himself in the moral citadel of which he has been able to gain
possession, while, around him, everything ebbs away, decomposes, and re-forms
itself. However that may be, we shall never see him approach form with the
desire to make it express the adaptation by the human being of his intellect
and his senses to surrounding nature. That is what the whole of ancient art and
the whole of Renaissance art did, but when the Chinese turns to form, it is
with the will to draw from it a tangible symbol of his moral adaptation. He
will always aim at moral expression, and will do so without requiring the world
to furnish him with other elements than those which he knows in advance he will
find in it; he will require no new revelations from the gestures which
translate it. Morality will be crystallized in the sentences that guide him. He
has only to treat nature as a dictionary whose pages he will turn until he
finds the physiognomies and the forms which, in their combination, are the
proper ones to fix the teachings of the sages. The agitation of the senses no
longer comes upon him save by surprise—when he studies the elements of the
plastic transposition too closely, and his science of form, detached wholly
from material things, no longer serves him for more than the defining of
abstractions. His immobile art demonstrates acquired truth, instead of
affirming new intuitions.

To sum
up, the Chinese does not study the material of the world that he may ask it to
instruct him. He studies it when he needs to objectify his beliefs in order to
attach more firmly to them the men who share them. It is true that he brings to
this study gifts of patience, tenacity, and slowness which are beyond
comparison. The ancient gropings of the first Chinese artists escape us. . .
One would say that for ten or twenty centuries they studied, in secret, the
laws of form before demanding of form that it express the laws of the spirit.